Saturday, April 23, 2011

How To Make Your Own Language

I have had a few people ask me about this and thought it would be a good idea for a blog post. I am an avid linguist (someone who studies languages) and have enjoyed making a few languages myself. An artificially made language is called a constructed language or conlang. There are various uses for conlangs. Some are made to study the human brain and how we perceive and learn words and grammar, some aspire to unite the world under one comment tongue, and others are made for purely artistic purposes. Additionally, a lot of people make artistic conlangs for universe projects (like for novels and video games).

There are several cheap ways of making your own language. You can find a way to encode English (like Pig Latin) or you can just come up with a parallel language to English by substituting each word with gibberish. But the more artistic and accomplished conlangs have more to them than that. If you go about making a conlang that resembles a natural language, with its own set of rules and quirks, the process will be certainly more entertaining and even educational. Through constructing my own languages, I have learned a great deal about linguistics, and I hope you will too.

A lot of people, especially people who are creative writers, have had the desire to create a language at one time in their life. But most don't know how to go about it. The project is certainly a large one, and can seem daunting to a novice. But I'm going to attempt to outline and explain the process in several easy steps. The first is developing a phonology (basically what letters, sounds, and combinations of letters and sounds can be used in the language). If you want to make up a new alphabet for the language, you can do it in this step. But typically it's less confusing to make the language first, and then make an alphabet. The second thing to do is develop the grammar (how words change and interact with each other). And the final step is to add vocabulary to the language by creating words. You can simplify this process by coming up with a set of small, basic words, and then combining them to make more complicated words. For instance you could have words for blue, wet, and area and then combine them to make the word for sea.

After you have created a language you can use it for many purposes. You could have a code to write sensitive information in, a unique language to add color to a species or culture in a novel or video game project, and even a blue print to help you study real languages. But remember, this is your language. If you don't want it to be complicated, you don't have to make it that way. If there are irregularities in English that annoy you, you don't need to carry them over into it. So take things at your own pace, and have fun!

Step I: Phonology

Every language has its own set of sound and spelling rules. For instance in English we don't have the gargling khhh sound that is prominent in languages like German and Hebrew. It's also against our spelling rules to end words with the letters q or v, or to have long strings of consonants like ngstsch. So the first step to giving your language a unique look and sound, is to come up with these rules. To help you, I'm going to outline all the common sounds in human languages and describe how they relate to each other.

There are three main types of sounds that humans can make. Vowels are made by opening your mouth in different ways and exhaling air while vibrating the vocal chords, consonants are made by closing your mouth in some way and diverting the air flow, and clicks are made by creating friction by rubbing one part of your mouth against another. It's most likely that all the languages you are familiar with only use vowels and consonants in words and use clicks as interjections (like tsk tsk), so I'll only focus on the first two.

There are an infinite amount of possible vowel sounds because there are an infinite amount of ways to blow air out your mouth. The different positions of the tongue and jaw muscles used while speaking vowels account for the majority of accent differences between versions of even the same language. For example American, Irish, British, and Australian English all have their own unique and easily distinguishable rules for how vowels are spoken. Because American English is either natively spoken or recognizable for most English speakers, I'll use it's rules and examples to describe common types of vowels.

Short Vowels:

A in AppleE in pEnI in pInO in pOpU in bUn (also called the "schwa" sound)OO in cOOk

Long Vowels:

A in blAmeE in scEneO in nOteU in tUne

Semivowels (really short vowels often used as consonants):

Y in YotW in Win

Diphthongs (combinations of vowels):

Long A + short I in sAnd
Short A + long U in cOW
Short O + long E in tIme
Long O + long E in bOY
Long O + short U in sAW

It is really hard to pinpoint rules about vowels because there are even inconsistencies from person to person. Many people pronounce two vowel sounds when they think they are only using one. For instance people in New York City and Boston tend to use a combination of the oh and uh sounds in words where other Americans use the ah sound. Consequently in some regions the word cot can sound identical to the word caught. Another example of vowel inconsistency is in the Midwest, where many Americans add a oo sound to their oh sound. When making a language's rules for vowels, you will most likely copy your own accent. But you can make your language unique by paying careful attention to this area. You can add some exoticness by following rules from French and Spanish rather than English. To illustrate a common difference. The made up word fane would be pronounced with a long a sound according to American rules, but would be pronounced like fah-nay with Spanish rules.

Consonants are thankfully a little more easy to map out than vowels. There are three main ways to distinguish consonants, by where they are made in the mouth, by whether they are a stopped sound or a continuing sound, and by whether or not the vocal chords are used. Most of the consonant sounds that I will discuss here are used in English, but a few are not. You can make your language sound exotic and even alien by throwing in rare consonant sounds and combinations, but also run the risk of rendering your language unspeakable by the average person. I'll start by defining some important terms used to describe consonants.

Voiced: when the vocal chords are used

Unvoiced: when the vocal chords are not used

Stop: when the sound is made by completely stopping airflow

Fricative: when airflow is restricted and diverted but not stopped

Nasal: when the sound is made by moving airflow from the mouth to the nose

Liquid: when there is mostly unrestricted airflow (these can be used like vowels)

To use examples to illustrate these concepts, the s in sand is unvoiced while the s in bays is voiced, t is a stop consonant because it's a sound that cannot be held for any longer than normal, while th is a fricative because it can go on indefinitely, m is a nasal sound because you need to blow air out your nose to say it, while l is a liquid because you need to blow air out your mouth. Try making the m sound while holding your nose or the l sound with your mouth closed... it's impossible. Here are some examples of consonants ordered by these criteria.

To give a few notes about these examples, v and f are sometimes considered "laterals" because air flows out of the sides of your mouth when you make their sounds, there are actually two different types of th sounds in English, one is voiced and one is not, and you should probably ignore the ch sound I mentioned because it has nothing to do with the ch in cheese and is really difficult for native Enlish speakers to pronounce because it's made on the roof of the mouth somewhere between sh and kh.

You might have noticed that there are a couple common consonant sounds that I have not mentioned yet. That's because the j and ch sounds are actually consonant combinations called affricates. They start with a stop consonant and end with a fricative. J is a combination of d and the zh sound (like in vision), and ch is the t sound quickly followed by the sh sound. The ts in tsunami is another example of an affricate.

Hopefully these descriptions of letters and sounds will help you decide how to make the pronunciation and spelling rules in your language. Before I move on to another subject though, I want to quickly mention that stress is yet another way to add color to a language. For instance, usually we give more focus to a certain part of a word. In English we say ba-NAAA-na, but in other languages it might be BUHH-nana or bana-NAHH. Some languages have specific rules about on which syllable the stress falls, while in others the stress varies greatly from word to word.

Here are some examples of how different phonetic rules change the look and sound of a language.

This is what a language with just a sounds and alternating consonants and vowels would look like:

Al alava kabara sala ba apa kana

A language where words can only have one syllable would look like this:

Mau tsi yung toi han mung

Here is an example of a vowel heavy language that only has three consonants:

Oa ki ana aihu noa hoi

And a consonant heavy language could look like this:

Dengr schtrochtnen kufthbar bint ausgrunder dengr brucht

To you these examples might have a resemblance to Arabic, Chinese, Hawaiian, and German respectively. That's because the balance between consonants and vowels, and the rules about how they fit together into words go a long way to give a language character.

Step II: Grammar

Now that you've thought about what the rules for spelling and pronunciation for your language could be, the next step is mapping out how the grammar works. Grammar is simply how words relate to each other. The most important factors of a language's grammar are parts of speech (the function of words), what order those parts should be in, and how words change to agree with others or alter their own meanings. It can be difficult to find a place to start defining a language's grammar, so I'll begin by defining some important grammatical terms.

Glyph: a self contained symbol, the lower case letter i has two glyphs, the line and the dot

Grapheme: the smallest written unit in a language, each letter is a grapheme

Phoneme: the smallest spoken unit, a basic sound like shh, sometimes a phoneme is made with more than one grapheme and vice versa

Morpheme: the smallest part of a language that has a meaning, for instance the word play has one morpheme and the word playgroundhas two

Noun: a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea

Article: a word that defines a noun, theis an article that suggests the noun is a specific thing and the article asuggests it's a more general thing

Adjective: a word that describes a noun

Pronoun: a word that takes the place of a noun

Verb: a word that puts nouns into action (action verb), describes their state, or equates them with other words (linking verb)

Adverb: a word that describes a verb

Preposition: a word that describes the relationship between other words

Interjection: a word that does not relate to any other words and can be used to directly illustrate an emotion

Particle: a morpheme that describes or changes the grammatical purpose of a word

Declension: how a noun, adjective, or article changes under different grammatical circumstances

Conjugation: how a verb changes to relate to a noun or to alter its own meaning

The relation and expression of these basic terms are what forms a language's grammar. It's important that you decide what type of grammar you want in your language. Analytical languages have words that seldom change forms, and rely mostly on word order and prepositions to convey meaning. Inflected languages have words that often change depending on what purpose they are serving and what exact meaning they have, and do not rely as much on word order. Synthetic languages throw particles next to words to describe how they fit into the sentence. And agglutinative languages tend to stack many small morphemes together to make larger and more complex words. Your language could be a combination of any of these types, just as every natural language is. English is a good example of an analytical language that has limited inflection, while Latin is heavily inflected, and German is both an analytical, agglutinative, and inflected language.

Even inflected languages tend to have a preferred word order, and analytical languages rely on rules on which parts of speech go where. The three most important parts in word order are the subject, the verb, and the object. Here are some examples of different word orders.

It's important to figure out what order you are going to use in your language. English generally uses SVO order (and if you aren't thinking too hard about it, your language probably will too). But other languages like Latin use SOV order. Sometimes the order can change depending on the type of sentence. For instance Spanish uses SVO in most sentences, but uses VSO when asking question. Adding other parts of speech to a sentence can also change the default word order.

For many languages, the most complicated and irregular aspects of grammar is declension and conjugation. Even if you don't wish to make an inflected or synthetic language that pays much detail to these things, it still is beneficial to understand some of the possible ways that a language can use declension and conjugation to convey grammatical meaning. For me personally, studying these aspects helped me a great deal in learning foreign languages that utilize them more, like Latin, Spanish, French, and German.

The common parts of speech that are declined are nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives. These are all words that have a hand in describing people, places, concepts, and so forth. Words can be declined by changing or adding to different parts of the word. The most basic part of the word is called its "stem" and anything added through declension are called "inflections" or "affixes". The three most common areas a word is declined in, is gender (which can be related to the gender of the object it describes or can be totally random), number (the quantity of the word, in English we have singular and plural versions), and case (how the word fits into the sentence, is it a subject, or an object, or something else?).

To illustrate this and other difficult concepts, I'm going to make up a special exemplary word. The word is bas (pronounced bahhs like how a British person would say bass) and means it or thing as a noun and to be as a verb. I'm going to decline it by adding suffixes in a similar fashion to how ancient Latin and Greek words were declined. Hopefully by comparing how I changed the word to how the meaning changed, you will begin to understand declension.

So let's talk about this for a bit, because it can be confusing. The most common cases are nominative, genitive, and accusative. Most English nouns don't have these declensions, but pronouns often do. For instance he is nominative, his is genitive, and him is accusative. When making your language you can choose what types of words you want to decline and how. Sometimes adjectives and articles match the declension of the nouns they modify like in los rojos libros (Spanish for the red books). Not all words have to be declined. The language could be like English and only decline common pronouns, but it could be like Latin and decline nearly every single noun and pronoun and make every adjective match them.

Also don't think that adding letters to a word is the only way to decline it. You could change its meaning by adding letters to the beginning of the root word, putting a particle next to it, or even changing the letters inside the root themselves. Here are some examples on how to make the word bas plural.

You can even combine these things: bas --> betha (changing and adding)

There are an infinite amount of ways that you can decline any given word. Therefore declension, however complicated it can be, is a great way to add some spunk to your language. And remember that you can throw different forms of declension on top of each other. Say if you wanted the plural betha to be masculine and genitive.

Bas - personBetha - peopleBethora - menBethorash - of the men

So the main concept of declension can be summed up here: if you wanted to make up a translation for the phrase of the men, you could simply make up a word for of, the, and men which might look like da la bes or you could use a declension system to make a single word bethorash that means the same exact thing --whatever suits your tastes.

The final aspect of grammar I want to cover is conjugation. This is basically anything that changes in a verb. Even analytical languages that are hardly inflected have some conjugation in them. English has three main changes that a verb can go through; it adds an s at the end to agree present verbs with third person subjects (e.g. he wants, the man talks), it adds the letters ed to the end of past tense verbs, and it adds the letters ing to form the present participle. Additionally some verbs in English also go through sound changes to denote the past tense (e.g. sing --> sang, catch --> caught). All of these changes are considered conjugation.

Inflected languages like German and Spanish have many more changes like this in their verbs. Just like how the phrase of the men can be rendered as only one word in an inflected language, long verbal structures like he was going can be expressed with one inflected word. Just like nouns can be declined in different areas, verbs can be conjugated in different ways. The most common are mood (are you describing something, telling somebody to do something, or giving a condition?), person (who is the subject?), number (is the subject singular or plural?), tense (did the action already happen, is it happening now, or is it going to happen?), and aspect (did the action happen once, did it continue over a period of time, or is it always happening?). Once again I'm going to use my little word bas to illustrate different possible types of conjugation.

As you probably can figure, conjugation can be endlessly complex. If you combine all the different forms for mood, person, number, tense, aspect, and even rare forms like gender, you could end up with hundreds if not thousands of different version of just one verb. Of course, you have the choice of how inflected you want the verbs to be in your language, you could make them like English and have only a few different forms and use pronouns and helping verbs to do the heavy work, or you could follow a more ancient and exotic pattern, and create a complex system. And remember, like with declension, you don't have to just throw letters onto the end of a word to conjugate it. You could change it in other ways too, like in this example.

Bas - to beIvas - he isIves - he wasSives - they were

I hope you are getting the picture. Basically you could say I will be going in your language analytically with a bunch of words like ech volm schin gend or you could use just one word that is changed according to set rules like ginendim. As always this is your language. So you can craft it either way and mix in any concepts that appeal to you. I'll also mention that you don't have to just have one set of conjugation rules, you could have formal and informal rules, written and spoken language variants. These are all things that will add depth to the language.

In summary, the things you need to think about when mapping out the grammar of your language is word order, how your language goes about defining parts of speech, the declension of nouns, and the conjugation of verbs. Of course even these things will never be set in stone, and you can continue to tweak them as you move forward. But it is important to have a game plan from early on about how your language is grammatically structured. That way you can start building the vocabulary in a manner that fits well into the structure of a sentence.

Step III: Vocabulary

Now that you have constructed the phonology and grammar for your language, the final step to embark on is building a vocabulary. This process on the surface seems the least complicated; all you need to do is make a bunch of words right? Well, you could do it that way, but here's the thing. Some languages have tens if not hundreds of thousands of words; where would one begin? I have had this problem myself in making my own languages. I would either make up words when I needed to use them, or go through the process of translating poems, short stories, and songs. But both of these ways can be unrefined, because when you don't make similar words together, similar words tend to end up looking totally different, which is both confusing and unrealistic. Also if you build a vocabulary by translating texts, you probably won't be making the most common and important words first, and will be creating a bunch of obscure words that can clog up your memory, and make it difficult to memorize or translate your own language.

So what is the solution to this problem? One solution I came up with is to create the most frequently used words first. If the first few hundred words you make are the most common words, you actually will have created about ninety percent of the the language in terms of usage, even though there are still thousands of more obscure words left to make. Another benefit to making the most frequent words first, is that larger and more complicated words in languages usually can be made up of combinations of smaller and simpler words.

To aid you in this process I have assembled a comprehensive vocabulary building guide. Here I have the one thousand most frequently used English words divided into parts of speech categories. There are six main phases and one preliminary phase. Once you find how each of these words will be represented in your language, you will have a dictionary that can be used to translate over ninety percent of the words that appear in common speech and writing, and once you memorize these words, you should be able to speak and write your language fluently and get any idea across. After you have mastered these one thousand words, you then can go on to create specific vocabulary lists for different aspects of life, like words used in the kitchen, or computer terms, or words for various animals and plants.

Preliminary Phase

Before creating all kinds of verbs, nouns, prepositions, and other words, you should pause for a brief time to figure out two important vocabulary systems; these are numbers and basic pronouns. It is impossible to speak for any length of time without using these words, and making them might help you develop the look and sound of your language.

There are two types of numbers, cardinal and ordinal. Cardinals describe how many of something there is (like one, two, and three) and ordinals describe where something appears in a sequence (like first, second, and third). You can either make both versions of each number, or have only one version that works both ways. There are an infinite amount of ways to go about creating a number system, but I'll use the decimal system based on tens to illustrate how it can be done.

First come up with eleven numbers, zero through nine. Here is an example:

Then you can use these roots to construct all the numbers from zero to ninety-nine. All you need to do is come up with a prefix for the teens and the tens. For instance if eight is aka, then eighteen can be akatika and eighty can be akinta. You can also make special words for large numbers like a hundred, thousand, and million. One way of forming fractions like a half and a third is to combine the cardinals and ordinals together. For instance the word for one-fourth could be mantasta (man + tasta).

The main pronouns consist of words that often take the place of nouns in a language, words like she, it, and them. These pronouns can have different forms for subjects, objects, and possessives, like he, him, and his. Making a list of basic pronouns is a fantastic way to refine your declension system if you have one. Here are some examples of important pronouns.

Your pronoun system doesn't have to be this complicated or, conversely, it could be even more specific. For instance you could have two words for we, one that means you and I and one that means they and I. You could fit all of these words together into a perfect system, with each one relating to the other, or you could make them a bit more irregular like English.

To conclude this guide to making a language, I have listed nearly one thousand vocabulary words in the final six main phases. Each of the phases is divided further into subcategories based on part of speech. Whenever you are not sure what words to add next to your language, just follow this list. After translating the first hundred or so words, you will be able to construct most simple phrases and expressions in your language, and by the times you have translated all thousand words, you will be able to speak and write it near fluently. But don't think this list is boxing you in or forcing you to dredge along a rigid path. It's only a guide to help you, and you can use it however you want.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page, or send me an email at cterra5@gmail.com. Happy language building!

Phase I100 of 100

Nouns 110 of 10
time
year
people
way
man
day
thing
child
government
part

Verbs 110 of 10
be
have
do
say
go
get
make
see
know
take

Adjectives 110 of 10
last
other
new
good
old
great
high
small
different
large

Adverbs 110 of 10
not
out
up
so
then
more
now
just
also
well

Prepositions 110 of 10
of
in
to
for
on
with
at
by
from
as

Pronouns 110 of 10
the
a
this
that
many
some
no
any
every
other

Conjunctions 1
10 of 10
and
that
but
or
as
it
than
when
because
so

Modals 1
10 of 10
will
would
can
could
should
may
must
might
shall
used

Relatives 1
10 of 10
what
which
who
where
when
why
how
how many
whatever
whoever

Adjectives 2
15 of 25
local
social
long
important
young
national
possible
big
right
early
public
only
able
political
particular

Adverbs 2
15 of 25
only
very
how
when
as
even
there
down
back
still
here
too
on
where
over

Prepositions 2
15 of 25
into
about
like
between
after
through
over
under
against
before
without
within
during
towards
off

Pronouns 2
15 of 25
own
more
same
each
another
most
both
every
much
little
several
half
few
either
less

Conjunctions 2
15 of 25
while
where
although
whether
until
though
since
alter
before
nor
unless
once
thus
therefore
however

Phase III125 of 330

Nouns 3
25 of 50
school
place
point
house
country
week
member
end
word
example
family
fact
state
percent
home
month
side
night
eye
head
information
question
business
power
money

Verbs 3
25 of 50
feel
may
ask
show
try
call
keep
provide
hold
follow
turn
bring
begin
like
write
start
run
set
help
play
move
pay
hear
meet
include

Adjectives 3
25 of 50
full
far
late
available
little
low
bad
main
major
economic
general
real
likely
certain
special
difficult
international
clear
sure
black
white
common
strong
whole
free

Adverbs 3
25 of 50
much
however
again
never
all
most
about
in
why
away
really
off
always
next
rather
quite
right
often
yet
perhaps
already
least
almost
long
together

Prepositions 3
25 of 50
upon
including
among
around
across
behind
up
along
according
since
despite
per
near
above
throughout
outside
beyond
round
beside
excluding
concerning
except
amid
twixt
notwithstanding